House GOP banking on Plan C

If Congress wants to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1, it will likely have to clear a one-week stop-gap funding bill to help the two sides come to some sort of agreement.

But even with all this, there’s no sense that the political dynamics on Capitol Hill will change. Republicans will likely find themselves in the same place: facing a Democratic president and Senate, which doesn’t want to negotiate on the debt limit or government funding.

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While the Republican rank-and-file complains of poor strategy from the top, GOP leadership sees their members shifting their goals on a constant basis.

However, it is also clear that Boehner suffers from a “trust gap” among a certain group of his members, one that is not going to go away while he wields his powerful gavel. If Boehner is for it, this faction has to be against it.

At a meeting of the Republican Study Committee Thursday, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) reminded members that they were the ones who wanted language defunding or delaying Obamacare in the debt-ceiling package, so they should support it. Many were unmoved.

Boehner and other Republicans thought that fighting for budgetary changes — chiefly changes to Obamacare — as part of the government funding bill was fruitless. He tried to refocus lawmakers’ energy on the debt ceiling bill, seeing it as more fertile ground for a fight. Leadership crafted a package of conservative favorites alongside the one-year debt-limit hike, including a one-year delay of Obamacare, jumpstarting the Keystone XL pipeline and instructions for tax reform. The idea was to put something in the package that everyone liked, and most of these measures had already been approved by the House, so Boehner and his top lieutenants were confident they could line up the votes for the measure quickly. Thursday proved them wrong, although top Republicans believe they will eventually be able to pass it.

But Republicans instead ended up holding back their support on lifting the debt limit, curious what a final government-funding bill would look like.

Boehner preferred a vote on the debt ceiling first, as a way to ease the passage of the government-funding bill. Cantor, however, wanted a vote on government funding first, and then the debt ceiling.

Republicans, once again, faced restive ranks when it came to lifting the nation’s borrowing limit. Republican insiders say they could have reached the 217-vote level to pass the debt-ceiling bill, but said they were not there yet. There were definitely skeptics about the GOP leadership’s debt ceiling package. Some Republicans thought it didn’t deal seriously enough with the debt — its centerpiece policies were a one-year delay of Obamacare and the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.